Written by a lay student of the Bible. Articles focus on apologetics and key elements such as the Deity of Christ and salvation through faith in Christ alone. With many thanks to Drs Brown, White, Sade, Wood, Qureshi, Dalcour and Zacharias, and Bros Shamoun and Rogers for their excellent teaching and inspiration. All glory goes to God for any truth I am able to communicate. Any errors are mine. All Scripture text is from the HCSB (Holman Christian Standard Bible) unless otherwise stated

Muslims make many claims. Some claim that they pray just as Jesus did. Others claim that they are better followers of Jesus than Christians. But to follow Jesus means to follow His commands. Do Muslims pray as Jesus commanded? No, they do not.

Instead, they do the exact opposite.

Jesus commanded, "Whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people." Matthew 6:5 Where do Muslims pray?

Jesus commanded, "... when you pray, go into your private room, shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Matthew 6:6

But wait. There's more.

Jesus commanded,

7 "When you pray, don’t babble like the idolaters, since they imagine they’ll be heard for their many words.

8 Don’t be like them, because your Father knows the things you need before you ask Him."

What do Muslims do when they pray? They pray memorized prayers 5 times a day, contrary to Jesus' command.

But wait. There is still more.

Jesus said,

9 “Therefore, you should pray like this: Our Father in heaven..." Matthew 6

Where Jesus instructs us to pray to our Heavenly Father, Muhammad taught his followers that their Allah is not a father (Surah 5:18; 19:88-93; and 21:26) and they are not his children. Muslims are only Allah's slaves. Did Almighty God create you to be a slave... or His child? You can take a hint from what King David had to say about the One True God in Psalm 139:13 For it was You who created my inward parts; You knit me together in my mother’s womb.14 I will praise You because I have been remarkably and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, and I know this very well.15 My bones were not hidden from You when I was made in secret, when I was formed in the depths of the earth.16 Your eyes saw me when I was formless; all my days were written in Your book and planned before a single one of them began.

Apparently the problem is one of a lack of logic in the thinking of the Muslim who first posited this argument. He was the Muslim showman named Ahmed Deedat, now deceased. If we follow Deedat's logic, a fire truck cannot be a fire truck unless it says "fire truck" on its side. It can contain all the fire-fighting men and equipment such a vehicle may require and go from one fire to the next doing its job saving lives and property, but to Deedat's adherents, it will never be one unless it has the words "fire truck" on its side. Hence the need for this important warning:

Muslim Deedat Fans, please note as well that this sample truck DOES have the words "Fire Dept" on its sides. But according to Deedat's poorly conceived argument, this necessarily means that the truck is a Fire Department, which in actuality is the office which dispatches fire trucks. Sadly, fire departments are housed in buildings without wheels or fire equipment, which means that this fire truck will not meet your criteria for what a fire truck is. Thus, it will remain unavailable to you to save the lives of you and your family should you ever require its services, God forbid. That is, for as long as you insist on following Deedat's bad logic. The moral of the story is: do not unthinkingly accept everything your showmen, imams or apologists tell you. Instead, think each claim through for soundness, rationality and good old common sense.
Soon enough, you will find yourselves reading the Bible and giving your lives to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

Was Jesus sent only to the Lost Sheep of Israel, as He said? Yes, of course He was. But there is a bigger picture we all need to see. We need to read Jesus' own words within the context of the whole story, which goes back to a promise God made about 2,000 years before Messiah:

In Genesis 12, Moses writes about what Yahweh God told Abram, a man from Ur of the Chaldeans, or what is known today as Iraq. 1 The Lord said to Abram:Go out from your land,your relatives,and your father’s houseto the land that I will show you. 2 I will make you into a great nation,I will bless you,I will make your name great,and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you,I will curse those who treat you with contempt,and all the peoples on earthwill be blessed through you. God chose Abraham to make of him a nation. From that nation He would create a holy people, separated for His purposes. He made them distinct from all the other peoples for a reason. They would not dress as the others dressed. They would not eat as the others ate. And they would not worship as the others worshiped. They were made a sanctified and holy people because out of that people would come the Promise to beat all promises. Out of them would come... the Messiah. The Messiah Whose very name announced His Message: Yeshua, which means "Yahweh Saves."

The Messiah Who would bring salvation forall. To the Jew first, and then the Gentile. Read again what Yahweh promised Abram (italics mine for emphasis): "... all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you." Genesis 12:3 God's Chosen People have been richly blessed, but they have also suffered much. If we read our Bibles correctly, more of both are still to come. But neither the blessing nor the suffering have been pointless because, through it all, they serve the purposes of God... the fulfillment of His promise to Abram. Yes, Jesus was sent only to the Lost Sheep of Israel. But that mission had a greater outcome that had always been a part of The Plan: to bring Yahweh's salvation to all the ends of the earth!

Muslims have a few favorite Bible verses which they love to throw at Christians in debates. Matthew 27:46 is one of them, even though it's a verse in which Jesus speaks from the cross, a fact which Islam denies ever happened. The verse reads:46 About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" Matthew 27 Jesus' words are a direct quote from the Messianic psalm 22. A thousand years before the coming of the Christ, the psalmist King David wrote:1 1 My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Psalm 22 As Christian apologists explain to our Muslim counterparts, Jesus shouted those same words from a cross which the Romans had erected at a spot which they had specifically chosen for its visibility to the many who were coming in and out of Jerusalem during the Feast of Passover. Where the Roman Empire had sought to make an example of Jesus by displaying His battered and bloodied body where the greatest number of Jews would be forced to see Him, Jesus Himself used it as a platform to proclaim the message that their Messiah had come, and that salvation for all was about to be secured through His sacrifice. Psalm 22 describes the agony Yeshua the Messiah endured both prior to and during His crucifixion, but the last portion of one verse sticks out because in it David says something he could never have imagined...16 For dogs have surrounded me;a gang of evildoers has closed in on me;they pierced my hands and my feet.

(in photo: actual bones from a 1st century victim of a Roman crucifixion)

"They pierced my hands and my feet." David wrote those words about 400 years before crucifixion had even been invented by the Persians. It would be almost 1,000 years before the Romans would refine it and turn it into one of the most evil and torturous methods of execution known to man. Only then would it be used on Messiah. David may not have known that he was prophesying about a very specific method of torture which would be used to murder his Lord. But he knew full well how the story would end, because he wrote:27 All the ends of the earth will rememberand turn to the Lord.All the families of the nationswill bow down before You,28 for kingship belongs to the Lord;He rules over the nations.29 All who prosper on earth will eat and bow down;all those who go down to the dustwill kneel before Him— even the one who cannot preserve his life.30 Their descendants will serve Him;the next generation will be told about the Lord.31 They will come and tell a people yet to be born about His righteousness— what He has done. Three days after His agonizing death, Jesus rose again from the grave, just as He had promised. And just as David had prophesied, one generation of believers after another tells others about the Lord... about His righteousness... and about what He has done!